The jazz snob from New Jersey who wrote about late-night radio

Donald Fagen's family moved to Kendall Park, New Jersey, when he was ten, and he hated it. The new suburb felt like a prison, and he recalled that it was probably the first time he realised his view of life was his own. What helped was late-night radio, and a cousin who introduced him to jazz at eleven. He went to the Newport Jazz Festival, called himself a jazz snob, and started travelling to Manhattan on the bus.

At the Village Vanguard he heard Earl Hines and Bill Evans, and he saw Mingus, Rollins, Monk and Miles Davis play. He learned piano, played baritone horn in the high school marching band, and developed a lifelong fondness for table tennis. At Bard College he studied English literature and met Walter Becker in a coffee house in 1967. Their college bands, he said, sounded like the Kingsmen playing Frank Zappa. None lasted, but the partnership did.

Becker and Fagen worked with Jay and the Americans under pseudonyms and wrote pop songs for ABC/Dunhill Records, which later released all of Steely Dan's albums of the 1970s. Fagen was the band's co-founder, lead singer and keyboardist. In 1982 he released his first solo album, The Nightfly, drawing on those Kendall Park years and nominated for seven Grammys. It includes “I.G.Y.” and “New Frontier”.

Four solo albums in all, with “Green Flower Street” among them. Steely Dan entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. After Becker died in 2017, Fagen kept touring under the band name until 2024. What began as a teenager's escape through the radio became a body of work about wanting somewhere else to be.